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would be boring to me. I always let my texts lead me, they know themselves where they want to go. Keeping a dog for decades has prepared me for this. You have to go where the creature, the text, wants to go. And sometimes it drags you along behind it, taking you somewhere completely different than where you originally wanted to go.
    SS: Do you imagine your plays on a stage or in a theatre as you write them? How physical or pictorial is your playwriting, or is it entirely linguistic?
    EJ: Well, I do have images in my head when I write plays, that suffices for me. When a director does something completely different, this interests me all the more. It would also be boring for me if the director (and of course also the actors) were to simply stage and illustrate what I prescribe to them. Although I do say how I imagine the play, it is all the more wonderful for me when I learn to see my own text with new eyes, through theatre practice. A play is never the product of the author, it is at most half, if at all, his or her work. It only comes into beingthrough collaborative teamwork. That’s what’s so interesting about theatre.
    SS: Theatre uses time differently to how it is used in the reading of a novel. We can read a novel in one sitting or over the course of days or even weeks. A play we watch in one go. I use narrative to manipulate or control time in my plays. Narrative is more elusive in your work. How do you think of the role of time in the creation of a play?
    EJ: I don’t rack my brains about that at all. I think time plays an important role in dialogues because timing here is very important. In order to learn that as well, I translate comedies, and also Oscar Wilde, whom I update and adapt though. So there they are again, the dialogues. But I myself have not been writing any dialogues for a very long time, actually since I began writing plays, because I want to hand over the time element, too, to the performers and the director. I want something new to emerge, something where my text only participates as one element among many. I provide only an offer, not even a master copy of a text.
    SS: Do you think about how your plays effect collections of people or do you write for individual audience members?
    EJ: No, not at all. I don’t think of the audience for one second. Nevertheless I am aware that I then surrender my writing to a collective.
    SS: What do you learn from watching your plays?
    EJ: Unfortunately I can no longer watch my plays because I suffer from an anxiety illness and can no longer visit the theatre. That’s why I lack this experience. In earlier times, when I could still go, I did watch the plays but I didn’t learn anything, except that I had to find a different form than that of dialogue, and that was something I already knew beforehand.
    SS: It’s thrilling to have a play of yours produced in Britain. We’re shamed by your absence from our major stages. How Austrian do you consider your writing to be? How Germanic?
    EJ: I’m sorry, too, that British stages don’t seem to have an interest in my texts. I think that’s also due to the different tradition, I simply don’t write any “well-made plays”, I wouldn’t be able to either, even if I tried. Because I live a very reclusive life, owing to my illness, I wouldn’t even know anymore how people talk to each other nowadays. Therefore I have to let ideas and ideologies compete against each other – also a sports metaphor. In any case, I come from the Austrian literary tradition, which is really quite different from the German tradition. In Austria, much more than in Germany, there has always been an audience and a reception for texts that critique language, texts that “let language itself speak”, so to speak. From the language philosophy of the early Wittgenstein on, via the language critic Karl Kraus, down to the Vienna Group of the postwar era. In Germany I don’t see this. I